(say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth),

lying not in travellers’ accounts, but rather in European accounts of precisely these imaginary sceptical natives: gazing inwards, brows furrowed, at the exotic curiosities of Europe itself.

as any intellectual of the time would have been, and his work is informed by the same critical questions: why are Europeans so competitive? Why do they not share food? Why do they submit themselves to other people’s orders?

Around 13,000 years ago they were supposed to have followed an arduous crossing from Beringia, the land bridge between Russia and Alaska, passing south between terrestrial glaciers, over frozen mountains – all because, for some reason, it never occurred to any of them to build a boat and follow the coast.

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of.

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

thousands of years before the origins of farming, human societies were already divided along lines of status, class and inherited power.